"Error: invalid download state try resuming"

[FUBARinSFO]

Hello:

This is a common topic on the forums going back several years:

Error: invalid download state try resuming

After some system problems of drive dropout, all 184 of my torrents are now tagged with this error. Furthermore, all of the unselected files are now selected. This is not the way things are supposed to work.

I haven't read all the posts. But I haven't seen (so far) answers to these questions:

1. What causes this problem?

2. What are the files that govern this behavior (resume.dat?)

3. What is the button mapping to the 'Resume' instructions that people seem to indicate is what should be done?

4. For files in torrents like 0-Day torrents, it is common to make only a selection, not to download the whole pack. All of my files in 100 or so 0-Day torrents are now selected for download. I don't want that. What is the name of the file that governs this set of selections for each torrent?

5. File resume.dat is encoded in bittorrent encoding. Is there an editor that understands that file, so that it can be edited, if necessary?

6. Restoring from an earlier state doesn't seem possible, as utorrent evidently rewrites status.dat and resume.dat each time utorrent is opened. I'd need some sort of historical backup to recover something several days earlier. What files are involved in this sort of recovery to a prior good state?

Thank you in advance.

-- Roy Zider

PLATFORM

utorrent 2.2.1 (build 25130)

Internet Explorer 7 (7.0.5730.13)

Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition

(Version 5.2.3790 Service Pack 2 Build 3790)

Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "5.2.3790.3959 (srv03_sp2_rtm.070216-1710)"

Tyan Tiger MPX S2466N-4M dual AMD Athlon 2000+

[DreadWingKnight]

1> deleting skip files

2> yup

3> "Start" or force re-chec first

4> partfile

5> Editing your resume.dat won't fix this problem.

Stop skipping files if you want this error to stop happening.

[FUBARinSFO]

OK, that's a good start. Thanks for the quick reply.

[FUBARinSFO]

On further investigation and testing, it appears that there is something fundamentally wrong with the file selection (skipping) feature of this version of utorrent.

Torrents that throw this error message are ones in which files have been skipped. On inspection, all the files have been reselected (display as 'normal' instead of 'normal' for selectied files and 'skip' for skipped files).

Simply restoring the partfile.dat file from backup (and any of the files, if necessary) does not solve the problem -- the selection of normal/skip files is evidently not stored in the partfile.dat file. This selection appears to be stored in the resume.dat file. Unfortunately, resume.dat has selections for all files and folders, not just the ones with problems. Somewhere along the line resume.dat is 'forgetting' its settings, triggering this error message.

It appears that the files have to be individually reselected in order to restore the problem file set to working order (in order to avoid having to re-download everything again).

Does anybody know

1) if there is a fix in for this problem? Or

2) if there is another bittorrent client that handles selections properly?

Thank you in advance.

-- Roy Zider